AUGUST 1952
The squawk box on his desk lit up and Harry McNeil pressed the button. “I’ve got a call from the county coroner,” his secretary said. “He didn’t tell me what case it’s about, though. Said you’d know.”
“Thanks, Cloris. Give me a minute to grab a file and then put him through.” Harry circled his desk and crossed to the three file cabinets on the far wall, so new their coated metal surfaces still gleamed. The drawer slid open noiselessly. Good-bye to out-of-warp wood dating back to the Coolidge administration. Hello, steel ball bearings.
He found the folder and closed the drawer. His whole office had been redone, and he didn’t miss the old oak desk with its stains and snags. He especially didn’t miss the wooden chair snapping and creaking whenever he leaned back. He said a silent prayer of thanks to the mayor and the aldermen as he sat in his quiet, comfortable desk chair. It had only taken them twenty-five years to find the money.
He picked up the phone and pressed the button. “Dr. Outwin? Thank you for calling me back.”
“Well, Chief McNeil, I do owe you a couple favors.” The coroner had a laugh like Santa Claus and a taste for jollity to match. Harry’s men had helped him safely home several times when he’d had a few too many cocktails.
“What did you find out?”
“Not much, I’m afraid. The young lady was between twenty-one and twenty-five, going by her teeth, and in good health, heart, lungs, and liver.”
“So what was the cause of death?”
“I don’t know.”
Harry looked out his window, where only a single plume of smoke from the Allan Mill broke the clear blue sky. “You don’t know?”
“It wasn’t a heart attack. She didn’t have any indications of a fatal allergic reaction. No signs she was assaulted.”
“Had she been interfered with?”
“I did find traces of male emission, yes. But there were no marks of violence on her body, so there’s no way to tell if she was willing or not.”
“Do you have a theory?”
“I have a possibility. If she had an aneurysm—that’s when a blood clot breaks off and is carried through the circulatory system to the brain—it could have killed her, then dissolved naturally. To anyone she was with, it would have looked like a brief seizure, followed by death. If she were with a married man or a customer…”
“He could have panicked and dumped her body.” Harry sat back in his chair, pleased with its smooth tilt. “Is there any way you can see her death being a homicide?”
Dr. Outwin sighed. “Poisons almost always leave their mark, although I suppose there could be something so exotic I didn’t catch any sign. Blowfish from the Japanese islands, that sort of thing. It could have been a drug overdose, but there’s a problem in that any amount of, say, heroin great enough to kill would register in her blood even after death. The liver doesn’t have enough time to flush all of the drug out of the system before it shuts down for good.”
“And you didn’t find any drugs.”
“She had alcohol before she died. Oh, and she was a smoker.”
“Well, that might have given her a cough, but it didn’t kill her.” Harry tried pulling out his lower drawer and putting his feet up. Very nice. “What’s going to happen with the body?”
“I’ve released it to the morgue. The state police will keep her as long as possible while trying to identify her. The detective with whom I spoke didn’t sound especially encouraging on that front.”
“I can guarantee you pinning a name on a girl who may have been a prostitute who died of natural causes is very low on Detective Carruthers’s to-do list.”
“That’s a shame.”
“I agree.” Harry swung his feet off the drawer and stood up, cracking his back. “Fortunately, my to-do list is a lot shorter.”
“I thought this case was under state police jurisdiction.”
“Oh, it is.” Harry grinned. “Fortunately, I have an in. It’s always wise to cultivate cross-jurisdictional friendships.”